Eleutheria: Paper Soldier
by justbecauseofthis
Summary: What's a dog without fangs? What's a person without steel? Janice Robin is a paper soldier with a switchblade, a penchant for violence, and a guillotine blade of debt suspended over her neck. When she's accused of illegal gambling and street fighting, Captain Levi steps in to help. [Levi x OC] *request
1. Chapter 1

I've never had anyone request a fic. So this is my first shot at that. The main character of this story is Shiranai Atsune's OC, Janice Robin.

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 **I.**

 _Don't you trust me?_ she had asked me.

Of course I did. Beth had been my best friend. I had trusted her and only her.

 _If you trust me, I need you to believe in one thing._

I had guessed she was going to tell me she needed me to believe in myself. But my best friend wasn't going to ask the impossible of me.

 _Believe that I believe in you . . ._

I trusted her—

But tell me, Beth, how am I supposed to do that when you're no longer here?

What do I believe in now? Whom do I trust?

 **II**.

Sometimes I see Hannah and Franz kissing in dark corners. They kiss each other very hard. It seems mortally urgent, so I can't help imagining that Hannah is dead, and Franz is breathing the life back into her. Because their kissing is just so passionate and intense and _portentous_. Hannah is a nice, pretty girl, Franz a nice, handsome boy, so I know how this story will end. It will end with a kiss and a symbolic ellipsis, those three little dots that imply a cut-off sentence, an incomplete thought, a last suspended breath . . .

I pass them, glancing behind my hair. Their faces are all-smiles and good-thoughts. Franz's hands gently follow the copper locks of Hannah's hair while Hannah gazes up at Franz (he's a full head taller than she) through the rusty, bold sweep of her eyelashes. Her lips are dark and plump with the aftermath of their kissing, and the apples of her cheeks are full with her smile. I imagine that they'll sneak out after curfew, find a place where they can be alone together, and kiss some more, undisturbed. Maybe they'll fall asleep in each other's arms, listening to the soliloquy of their synchronized hearts beating.

I know how their story will end . . .

I keep going. I walk to the cafeteria where all the cadets eat. The instant the door opens, the smell of hot food springs toward me, and the swell of voices abruptly balloons. Beneath it all, I hear the clang of a ladle in a metal pot, and my stomach heaves as I feel the imaginary tasteless lump of gruel hitting my palate. The door shuts behind me. I move toward the serving line, ghosting between tables.

I see Mikasa and Eren and Armin, and Eren looks at Mikasa as if he doesn't see her, expressionless. His eyes are on her face, though his thoughts are beyond her. Mikasa looks back at Eren, and whenever Mikasa looks at Eren, her black eyes become very still and focused and almost—vulnerable. It must be hard, caring about somebody like Eren Jaeger.

Sometimes I wonder if he has the subconscious goal of becoming a corpse as quickly as possible. We call him the suicidal maniac for a reason. But fate—or is it luck?—has a way of stepping in and keeping him from going six-feet under. What Eren wants, consciously or subconsciously, doesn't matter. He'll live—

Though I can't help sympathizing with Mikasa. I see the way she boxes him in, as if to package him away from peril and pain, like a precious pearl inside a treasure chest. But how do you stuff an impulsive boy inside a safebox when he's the source of his own destruction? How do you protect and save someone whose biggest threat is himself?

How do you save anyone at all?

Supper in hand, I don't sit down at a table. I head outdoors. The breath of nighttime sheds across my neck, and autumn leaves swirl up in a sudden wind, scattering over the moonlit lawn. I go around to the back of the cafeteria.

Already the mangy mutt is there, sitting obediently, its gaunt, crooked tail wagging through dry dust. With my fingers, I pick out dollops of gruel and allow the dog to lick them from my palm. Its teeth are yellow and its gums are black. It'll start losing teeth soon. What's a dog without fangs? I wonder. I think about that for a while, as the dog gives me a pleading, willful look, its black eyes boring into my face. I give in and set my entire tray down. I squat in the dirt, balancing on the balls of my feet, watching the dog's mouth slopping up my supper, thinking: What's a dog without fangs?

I know the answer.

I don't have fangs. Some people do, though. They have sharp incisors that look just like fangs. Eren has incisors like that. That's why he can manage to look like a savage beast when his top lip pulls back from his teeth. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of a hot glare like that. I wouldn't want to be on Eren's bad side, _ever_.

I reach into my pocket and pull out my switch. The moon strikes across the silver metal, flashing it metallically in the darkness. I have something better than fangs: I've got steel. What's a human without steel? I wonder. I test the blade. I put it against the outside of my wrist and lightly scrape my skin, watching as the downy hairs fall away, in a close, precise shave.

I'm careful. I don't want to break my flesh. I wouldn't do that on purpose. I wouldn't do that on purpose, even though I know what it's like to be gripped by numbness. I wouldn't do that on purpose, even though I know how it feels to go through life in a washed-out drowse, a half-light gloom, wading through a sea of empty, endless nothing.

I've disappeared. I disappeared a long time ago when Mom and Dad and Beth were taken from me. Titans took them from me, and a wound appeared deep inside my chest, festering into that thing that makes me who I am—my spirit, my soul, whatever you want to call it. I'm rotting from the inside.

Sometimes, I wonder if I'm real at all.

Suddenly I whip around, my switch blurring with speed. In the moonlight, it flashes white and hot across a strong, bare throat. Beneath the flat of the blade, I feel the outline of a throat column and the bulge of an Adam's apple and it'd be easy, _simple_ , to snap my wrist and, in one swift stroke, slash right through the carotid artery and kill this person. The blight inside me wants to do it. It wants to wield the violence twisted within me. Two cold, pale, immobile eyes stare at me. I take my blade away.

On automatic reflex, my mouth prepares an apology. I stop myself. I don't want to apologize for my survival instinct. I _won't_ apologize for that. I'm a survivor. I'm a soldier. I bear the Wings of Freedom crest. And nobody knows surviving instinct better than Captain Levi himself. Instead of an apology, I offer him a pristine, proper salute.

"Well aren't you on edge," he says. There's cold, aloof irony in his voice.

"Always," I say.

His eyes are on my face. They're very still and very cold. But wading through my drowse, I don't feel any injury from his unfriendliness. I hardly feel anything at all. "Even though you're surrounded by comrades?" he says, his voice flat, calm, indifferent.

I slide my switch back into my pocket and lift a shoulder. "I never let my guard down."

"Switches aren't used to kill titans. They're used to kill _people_. Do you plan to kill someone?"

Just as I reach for them, the words in my head evaporate and I have no words to grasp. I can't look at the captain. His eyes are on my cheek. I feel them, cold, steady, astute, and then he goes on past me. I watch the precise trim of his black hair, gliding farther and farther away, sinking into the darkness.

The words in my head return and I clutch onto them too late. They're neither clever nor complicated.

 _I don't know . . ._ I don't know if I plan to kill someone.

But I suppose I'll find out.

 **III.**

I hadn't meant to. But I've opened my knuckles on some guy's skull. He's unconscious now, lying at my feet, crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut. He's a massive man, all muscle and iron bone, and I've knocked him out cold. My fist is smarting, and my fingers twitch spasmodically, stinging pinpricks of pain shooting through my nerve endings. Scarlet blood emerges from starburst cracks in my skin. I hadn't meant to split my knuckles. I've hit him too hard.

The crowd hemming in the makeshift fighting arena breaks into cheers and cries and curses. The bulk of them are unhappy I've won. The majority had bet against me; I'm slim and not very tall. They misjudged me, hadn't considered my speed. I'm quick—that's my other talent. I'm disappeared, I'm rotted, and I'm _fast_.

To hide my identity, I'm wearing a papier-mâché mask. It's blank white and expressionless with two empty holes cut out for the eyes. It's not so different from my real face. Maybe it is my real face. Maybe my real face is all but papier-mâché and empty, cut-out eyes. Maybe that's all I am. A paper soldier.

These clandestine street fights are held at the edge of the slums. And impoverished slums are fertile ground for unbridled violence and rage. The crowd starts to violently churn, under the delusion they've been cheated out of their money; that I'm the cheater and they the victims. Their bodies knock against the feeble wood fence closing us in. The boundaries rattle, and I grip my black-handled switch. A man spits in my direction. His eyes gleam like cat eyes.

I want to fade. I want to plunge into the ground and vanish from all the black, savage stares surrounding me. If I were paper, I could fold into myself; I could become origami; I could let the wind carry me somewhere else. I could float away.

The ref seizes my wrist, raises my arm, and announces my victory. Warm scarlet bleeds down my hand. Pulled by gravity, little red rivers dribble down my arm, splitting off into branches that keep growing down my wrist. The ref drops my hand. I let it fall to my side, and the rivers retract. They follow their branches, inverting now, doubling back toward my open knuckles.

The crowd murmurs with disappointment. But they've stopped churning in a fiery horde, now begrudgingly resigned to my win.

Outside the ring is a dilapidated ticket booth that's usually employed to host street fight gambles. I walk up to an old man posted inside and collect my prize money. That's the reason I'm here: _money_. It's the reason most people are Here. I think of Eren Jaeger. Eren is here, on this Earth, for something beyond himself, something beyond any material item. He wouldn't fight for gold. He wouldn't prostitute his strength that way. Suddenly there's a tinny taste in my mouth, and my flesh starts to cringe away from my bones. The blight inside me has made me like this. And I don't know how to remedy the rot because losing everything isn't a disease. It's a state of being.

 **IV.**

My pockets glutted with cash, I'm walking through town, my strides slow and even but deliberate. My legs have direction. I have a destination in mind. I'm on my way to repay my debt. It's the cloud that constantly hangs over my head, hovering above all that I do.

This part of the district is very still, the street desolate and baked by the day's heat. My footfalls, though hushed and mitigated, are the most distinct noises breaking the otherwise placid silence. I look out at the world through the cut-out holes of my mask. I haven't taken it off. Sometimes this is how I feel when I'm wearing my naked face; I feel as though I'm looking out through two gaping cutouts, passively watching the world, meaningless and disembodied like a figurine. Unnecessary to the fabric of things.

If I were to write it down, who would read my story?

Abruptly, I turn about-face and I see them—the two shadows that have been trailing me since the street fight. Now I see their faces. They're men with big bodies and plain, nondescript faces. I won't remember them tomorrow. I might passively retain an unfocused image of two large smudges. But that's all. I won't remember their eyes, their hair, or any of their details. Just their largeness and their plainness.

They're watching me, their eyes searching my clothing. It's a close kind of attention, but not a carnal kind of closeness. I don't feel their eyes on my bare skin or behind my mask. I feel their eyes inside my pockets. They want my money. Everybody wants money, even if it belongs to somebody else. Within the confines of the walls, away from titans, monetary greed dominates. If it's not the chains of mortality enslaving us, it's the shackles of the empire. Nobody is free. Nobody—except . . . perhaps a dog without fangs. Because a dog without fangs is—

One of the large, plain men comes forward. His hand flicks out by his thigh, lowered, tensed. I see his thick fingers flex and hear the metallic click before seeing the silver. He's snapped open a knife. My eyes go to it.

 _Switches aren't used to kill titans._

I reach behind my back, feeling the metal of my own blade, resting hot and ready against my belt. The muscles in my arm bunch up, the cracked skin over my knuckles pulling tight and sharp. Fresh blood runs over my hand.

 _Do you plan to kill someone?_

I remember that stray mutt and its black gums, and I imagine its teeth falling out like shattered bits of bone until it's left with nothing but a tacky black palate and useless, empty roots. My jaw clenches, hard and ready, and I watch, clear-eyed with adrenaline, as the man raises his knife. It plunges toward me, silver and flashing. I fling out my wrist, clearing away the attack. The tip of my blade parts the flesh on the top of his hand.

With amazing clarity, I watch the crimson streak that I draw as I make it. For a second, I feel like an artist with a paintbrush instead of a soldier with a switchblade. For a second, I'm a creator, not a killer. Then I leap away, sprinting down the road, adrenaline hot in my blood. Homicidal shouts follow close at my heels, pushing me harder, faster, I've got to get to HQ before they _murder_ me.

I cut to the right, bounding off one leg, swerving into an alley. There's a pile of crates stacked against a wall. I swing my arms back, squatting. I push off the ground, propelling myself to the top. When I land, the crates wobble beneath me. I lose my wind and my heartbeat, and my arms unfurl like wings, lifting my weight and steadying my equilibrium. _Make me weightless_ , I think, _Let me fly_. The crates stop shaking. I take a deep breath and look up at the rooftop. I can make it. Leaping again, I propel myself onto the roof, landing light and catlike on the pads of my feet. I look on. A chain of rooftops unfolds before me like a runway and I take off, soaring. I see the tower of HQ cresting in the distance. It's not too much farther now. I'm in the home stretch—

Down below me, playing in the dirt street, I see the memory of three children. Two boys and a black-haired girl.

I like the blond boy. He has clear eyes and a clear face and a clear mind. He has dreams, even when he's awake, and I don't know anybody else who can dream that way, with their eyes open. He reminds me of a poem I read once: "Nothing Gold Can Stay _._ " It's about how innocence and new beginnings must ultimately plateau, giving way to ennui and unfeelingness. That's what the title means by nothing gold can last. Nothing pure can remain that way. And this boy—he reminds me of the gold things in the poem. The innocence before the tragedy. He's nature's first green and leaf's early flower and all new budding things. He's good.

Although she may not be good or gold or pure, I like the black-haired girl too. She has a scarf around her throat like a fluttering blood-red ribbon. She reminds me of a butterfly with plucked wings, her flight stolen by savage, rapacious fingers. She's the antithesis of the blond boy. She's the tragedy after the innocence. If he is dawn, then she is day; if he is Eden, then she is grief. If he's newborn flesh, then she's a scar. But I like them both. I think they're both inevitable and essential to this world. We could be friends, perhaps, if I weren't so afraid to say something.

The last kid, the dark-haired boy, I feel differently about. Not only do I like him, but I also _admire_ him. His eyes blaze with iridescent colors. I think it's because his heart is kaleidoscopic, changing hues all the time, like a glass prism divided by light, spraying the brilliant, imprisoned colors of his soul upon the world. But, most importantly, he's got fangs. And fangs on a human being are incredibly rare. He's a rare and iridescent person. And I believe in him. I believe in his dreams.

I'm hiding behind the corner, watching those three with timid interest, my shadow pinned to the brick-and-mortar wall. I want to go out to them. I want to speak to them. I'm too afraid. My shadow won't move.

Armin.

Mikasa.

Eren—

When the world fell apart, I was on the outside looking in, my shadow far removed from their shapes. I was a reader of their story, an outsider, studying their history, predicting what would happen next . . .

I was too preoccupied thinking about their story that I forgot about mine. Then the world fell apart, and the titans came, and they ran, and I ran the other way—

The world was crumbling around me, around them, around us, and I needed to get home. So I ran, my shadow darting around the corner, flying over the ground, silent and fast. And I'm still running. I can't stop—

 _—STOP following those three. They're going to get themselves killed, running around like that. And you'll end up following them straight to the grave! Where in the almighty universe are their parents?_

Mom, Dad, Where in the almighty universe are you?

Where did you go?

If only I hadn't been following them. If only I had listened to you. If only I hadn't wanted to be in their story. If only— If only—

"If only" leads down a road of regret.

I. Can't. Stop.

Run run run run. . .

 **V.**

I'm standing under the shower, but I'm still running. I'm always running, running, even if my legs are motionless. The water is warm—too warm—it's scalding hot—

I don't care. I don't feel it the way I should. I'm freezing cold. My skin turns an angry pink color. I wrap my body into my arms. Shhh . . . I hush myself, I hush my mind, I hush my flesh.

Shhh, you're okay, you're okay.

With passing time, the temperature of the water drops, and losing my sense of _here-and-now_ , wandering in _way-back-when_ , I don't realize how long I've been standing there, visiting a litany of broken memories, until the water sprays, ice-cold, against my neck. At last I return from the past and shut off the faucet. Shivering, I step out from the shower and into the washroom. I scrub off with a towel until most of the water has been sponged up from my skin. I've remained a bit steamy. The humidity trapped in the washroom continues to tenaciously cling to my body.

The aftermath of bar soap and a good rinsing leaves me feeling pure and new. I can start again. That's what I believe in the first few moments after the shower. Those feelings pass once Mikasa enters the washroom. With her quality of a tragic, flightless butterfly, she floats through the door. She's a reminder that this world is cruel. And I remember my parents. I remember Beth. I remember my debt—

 _I need you to believe in one thing._

Now, standing in front of the sink mirror, wrapped tightly in a towel, I run my fingers through my short, dark, wet hair, pushing it back from my forehead. I realize, a sinking feeling in my stomach, that I've forgotten a change of clothing. A fever burns under my skin—it's a restrained, insular irritation. I berate myself, How could I forget my clothes? Now I'll have to go out there in a towel and hope to the heavens that the halls are empty and everybody is still training. I glare at the face in the mirror glaring back at me.

I scrutinize myself in the glass. My almond-shaped hazel eyes are a bit red and faded. I look tired and depthless, as though there is nothing under the skin of my face; as though, if you were to peel back my flesh, you wouldn't see bone. You'd see my papier-mâché mask without its cut-out eyes. Just smooth, blank paper. A boneless, featureless face crafted of parchment and paste.

I feel the intangible touch of eyes, close on my skin. My eyes go to Mikasa in the mirror, standing behind me in the back of the washroom. She's looking at my hand. Following her attention, my reflection puts its eyes on the dark starburst scabs breaking from my knuckles.

I pretend not to see it. My reflection turns and strides toward the door. The image's black hair drips water down the nape of its neck, onto its shoulders. The image is me. I know that. But I don't feel like we're the same person. I feel distinct from it, alienated from my own image. I feel the separation as distinctly as I feel the separation between You and Me.

As I'm leaving, Mikasa doesn't say anything, and I don't expect her to. But I feel her gaze on my back—the ugly, rotted part of me—so I turn over my shoulder. She's turned away now, her attention at the buttons down her shirtfront. I wonder if I've imagined her looking. I wonder if my deep-seated self-consciousness heightens my levels of paranoia and provokes me to feel people looking when, really, nobody has expended a single thought on me.

I push out of the washroom. The cool, spacious air of the hallway pours over me, and my skin tightens into chilled gooseflesh. I feel that my bones may pop through my skin, the way sharp corners break through tight plastic wrapping. Enclosed inside a towel, I hurry to my room. Chilled to the bone, I'm hurrying so recklessly that my legs don't cease moving when I see a door come open and a body careen into the hallway. Someone is hurrying in the same way that I'm hurrying, cold and reckless. Our trajectories collide. We hit each other.

I gasp in shock when I feel warm, humid, bare skin against my warm, humid, bare skin. I look up into familiar iridescent eyes—for once, they're cooled and calm, merely at a smolder rather than at an uncontrolled inferno. His soaked hair is stuck to his forehead. A towel is spun around his waist. I avert my eyes. His eyes avert too. We apologize at the same time in the same mumbling tones and then we step around one another and continue hurrying in opposite directions. I'm embarrassed. I wonder if _he's_ embarrassed. I promise myself that I will never forget my clothes again. Before I turn off into the girl's hall, I hear behind me, a distance away, "I will murder you, Connie. I swear I'll kick your—"

For a moment, I had felt real.

 **VI.**

Dressed and dry, outside behind the cafeteria now, I set my supper tray on the ground. I've surrendered to the mutt again. It's slopping up gruel and bread and leaves nothing behind. It still has its teeth, but they wriggle and draw blood. An empty mouth is soon imminent.

Sitting on the back steps of the cafeteria, I look up at the sky. The patch of sky that I see isn't very pretty. Clouds obscure the stars and there isn't any moon right now; it's hung behind a shapeless black mass. Laid out in front of me, the dry autumn trees appear clawlike, reaching from out of the ground, with their sharp, scanty branches piercing the black velvet sky. I exhale and bend my head. I feel the back of my neck open up, vulnerable. Without any hair to hide it, my nape becomes a perfect target. I wonder how a titan feels when my blade shreds apart their central nervous system. I hope they feel pain. I hope the sensation of steel is agonizing.

As I sit there, with the moon behind the clouds, the trees tearing at the sky, my nape perfectly exposed, the dimensions of solitude seem vast around me, and I feel inviolably alone. It seems that nobody can penetrate the intermediate space between my heart and the skin wrapping my bones. I think of Hannah and Franz, and the way they gaze into each other's eyes. And as I think of those two, a nonspecific jealousy seizes me. They've found a way to break through the inviolable loneliness between You and Me. They are Us. And I want to know what it's to be Us. Beth and I were best friends; we understood one another at a depth that I haven't reached since then. Now I'm alone, barely here, with hot steel in my pocket.

"Which of you is the dog?"

The voice startles me. My heart jumps—then it pounds, fast and hard, like I'm running. But motionless where I sit, I haven't moved from the steps. I withhold any change from my face, pretending that I haven't been taken off guard. It isn't difficult because my face has lost much of its expression, anyway. I have flat, mute eyes now—and a flat, mute face.

Staring at the ground, I don't look up because I know who it is. I recognize the voice instantly. Without finding him with my eyes, I find his presence by listening for his movements. I hear the rubber treads of his shoes, nearly silent on the grass, as he comes toward me.

"I don't understand what you mean," I say. I stare at the ground, but I don't see anything in front of my eyes. My vision has gone blurry as I focus on listening, concentrating on Captain Levi's motions, the hiss of his clothing, the rubber of his shoes.

He doesn't explain anything, continuing, "It looks to me that _you're_ the dog. That creature's got a whole plate of food, after all, and what've you got?" There's calm, dry, irony in his voice again, and I start to think about how this is my second time talking to him; that it's unusual to entertain, on more than one occasion, the company of somebody with Captain Levi's clout or the celebrity of Humanity's Strongest. Some people would find it a gift, a dream come true, to talk to Captain Levi in this casual setting. I find it terrifying.

"Taxpayer money goes to feed soldiers," he says, "not animals."

My heart doesn't slow. It keeps racing as he sits down beside me and now I'm nervous and self-conscious because I'm not very good with people. I'm clumsy in conversation; I let too many silences go unfilled. Even now, I let a moment of silence pass between us. He sits so close I can feel his body temperature.

"This is the second time I've seen you give your supper away to that mangy mutt," he says. And I'm thankful he's talking again. Captain Levi isn't known for his sociability—in fact, he's infamous for the opposite—so I'm grateful that he's talking again. Otherwise, he'd be saying nothing and I'd be keeping my mouth shut and one of us would have to leave.

"Its teeth are rotting," I tell him.

"That so?" he says. But he doesn't sound very interested, and I realize I've said something uninteresting. But, much worse, I've said something insignificant. _Meaningless_. I've wasted both my breath and _his_ time. Apart from myself, who gives a damn about this dog's rotting mouth?

I wish he weren't sitting next to me. I feel as though I'm under a magnifying glass, the all-seeing eye of authority bearing down on me. I can't mess up. I can't stumble. I must be perfect. I'm afraid that he can see the blight inside me.

"They'll fall out soon," I go on stupidly. "And when that happens, what'll it do?"

"Liquefy its solids," he says, and I could laugh if I weren't so tightly wound right now. There are iron cables in my back, taut and rigid, anchoring me to the ground. Right now, I don't have the lightness of being to laugh. I'm heavy with memory and debt.

It takes all my courage to lift my eyes to his and hold them steady.

"What's a dog without its fangs?" I say, a bit too intently, a strange earnestness in my tone. Captain Levi keeps his eyes level with mine, and I don't look away. I won't until he answers me.

"A dog without fangs," he says, his voice low, calm, inflectionless, "is a dead one." He's still looking at me, his eyes steady and cold without being unkind.

Turning away, I nod. Yes, a dog without fangs is a dead one. Exactly. And a human without steel is—

"Cadet," Captain Levi says. "Your name, what is it?"

"Janice Robin."

"You're older than the other recruits."

"I—" I lean my elbows on my knees, not knowing how to respond. I'm twenty. I don't tell him that. "Wrinkles?" I finally say, and there's enough darkness in the way I say it that I communicate to him my resistance to discuss anything about myself, including my age, however trivial that may be.

The captain stares at my face, probably searching for wrinkles. If I have any, they're infinitesimal. "Demeanor."

"What you're saying is, I act like an old hag."

"That's right."

"If I'm an old hag, what does that make you? My great uncle?" I've called my superior officer old, I realize after I've already let the words off my tongue. I've said something unacceptable. I look out at the forest, concealing my apprehension under a blank-paper face.

"I would hope not," he says.

"Why, too ashamed of coming from the same bloodline as me?"

The captain looks at me, his eyes very still. But I'm turned in profile, looking away. In my peripheral, I see his hand rise, then it falls away from sight and I feel the static of his fingers, not quite contacting my hair, but near enough to trigger the sixth sense on the back of my neck, my skin seeming to pull away from his touch without a single muscle moving. He doesn't touch me, though, his hand suspended unmoving in my personal space.

"You trimmed it," he says.

Beth had long hair, and my mother had long hair. Long hair doesn't do anybody any favors.

My eyes go dim, and it is quiet until the trees beyond us let down a whispering sound of dry leaves. His hand withdraws, returning to the peripheral of my vision. I see his fingers go to his leg and rest there.

"I'm assuming you have a reason for coming here?" I say. I'm looking at the ground, but I'm watching the captain's hand. The skin on the back of my neck is still prickled with static.

"You're suspected of being involved in illegal activities."

"Which activities?" I say.

"Street fights and gambling."

I see his hand, immobile and strong, veins lazily dividing the skin. I do not speak.

"You're not going to deny it?"

I don't look at the captain, instead moving my eyes to watch the pale shreds of moonlight cutting through the trees. "I have a debt to pay. And I can't do that with our lousy salary. So I've found another source of income."

"You sound like a regular underground thug. They've always got debts to pay."

"I'm no thug."

"What are you, then?"

"I'm—" My eyes go to his. He's watching me, his face inscrutable, serious, calm, uncritical. I look away at the shredded ribbons of moonlight again. "An unreliable friend," I say. "That's what I am."

And I'll be making amends for as long as I'm still breathing—


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's note:**

 **Confession—I've never written a fic where an OC is the main character. So all this is new territory for me. And I'm also an EXTREMELY slow writer.  
**

 **Thank you for reading.**

* * *

 ****VII.****

 _What are you, then?_

It's a question I could spend my whole life answering:

One, I'm a paper soldier.

My face is blank with empty, cut-out eyes, and across the dirt ring, parallel to me, stands my next opponent. This person is of modest dimensions, neither very tall nor very wide, obscured by a dark, liquid cloak that lifts, in a fluid swell, as a gust of wind rides through it. A dark hood swims around the face, concealing the head. I can't determine if my opponent is a man or a woman. Neither can my opponent determine if I'm a man or a woman. My frame is hidden under a tunic that flaps around my wrists, making me genderless.

The focal point of my eye distills to this one person; it's the tunnel vision that comes with perfect, unadulterated violence. The people in the crowd—wild and tumultuous as they are—whirl away, and it is only me and my opponent. My attention concentrates unswervingly to my goal. There's the clash of a brass bell. I raise my hands. Their hands rise too.

My eyes are so closely fixed to this person's hands that I see the lazy blue veins dividing them. They are strong hands, steady hands, and as they move toward the hood, a smooth gliding finesse inhabits the fingers, the arms lifting with an almost eerie ghostlike fluidity. Wrists turning, those smooth gliding hands seize the hem of the hood. My arms flex and my fists tighten and the clotted wounds on my knuckles strain. I watch the hood lower, and upon the fabric falling away, my limbs set into an impotent, ice-cold paralysis. Unable to move, unable to think, I stare unblinkingly.

Two empty holes of a papier-mâché mask peer into my face, dark, rigid, and bottomless. It's my own image. My own image is standing in front of me, separate from my body. The empty, cut-out holes pull me in, as though my retinas are attached to their infinite, black voids, fixed by two steel wires, retracting, and dragging me forward. I dig the heels of my boots into the ground, immovable.

My reflection is quick—quicker than me—it darts forward. I fling out a fist. Anticipating the movement, the image ducks back a step, the cloak fluttering up between us. My hand catches vacant space, and in the aftermath of the motion, my fist falling away, my shoulders rotate off-center, baring an open target. My reflection uses it to tag me hard in the ribs, cutting their fist up into the curve of my side. Once—twice—three times—each time with a hollow sound of merciless, violent contact.

I arch forward, breath punched straight from my lungs. My breath then shudders into impotent, punctuated gasps, my lungs stitched with pain. Gritting my teeth, I hush my shrieking side— _Shhh, Shhh_ —then swerve around, my left hand winding back, swinging—

This too my reflection anticipates. They cut a leg behind my calf and steal the ground from under my feet. The sky recedes above me, rooftops and buildings climbing higher and higher, rising to a dizzying loom with vertiginous speed. I feel my gut suspend in my body, afloat, I'm falling. My hands fling out beneath me and catch my weight, attenuating the impact on my head. Twisting, I roll aside. The crack of a boot comes down at the point where my head had landed, impressing in the dust the perfect pattern of a rubber-gripped sole.

Rocking my legs, I somersault back onto my feet. My weight steadies on the ground again, and I raise my hands in a defensive stance until I can find a way to outmaneuver this keen, savage, cracking-whip of an opponent.

This flavor of violence, this brutal, calculated, indiscriminate violence, I've never tasted before. It arises from a person who understands the intricacies of human anatomy, a person who knows the precise point of the body to hit to get the results they want. A person who knows no limits. Anticipating each flicker of my hand, each shift in footing and weight, my opponent foresees every movement before it begins with an almost clairvoyant accuracy.

And then I don't know if this terrible masked entity standing before me is the reflection or if I am. Perhaps I'm only a refraction of light, throwing back the image of whomever steps in front of me. Perhaps I'm the one who isn't real.

 _No._

Strength heaves through my arms in a sudden red-hot fever, and the scabs knitted over my knuckles break open. I'm fast—

My opponent is faster. They lunge. I cut aside and swing my fist. My other fist follows, all my rage and mass weighted behind my broken-skinned knuckles. But somehow my reflection outwits me, whirling out of range, the cloak ballooning up like black water with a soft, butterfly sound of flapping cloth. My fists come away, fruitless. But I do not relent. I move forward, pushing my opponent back, giving them no recovery time.

To the outside eye, I might appear desperate and maybe even unrefined, the way I draw power from a strange and sudden upwelling of passion. I'm angry. My body has been seized, usurped, by a profound hatred. I hear, foreign to my ears, the wild rage in my voice as it spins out of me in snarling bursts with each fast, furious lunge of my legs.

My reflection, weaving away, seems to dance around each of my attacks in the same way that a fly seems to, through some inexplicable vanishing act, always escape every newspaper swat. But the distance between the ring and us fighters is rapidly closing—and then, caught on the blind side, this masked mirror-image comes up short against the shoddy, wood posts boxing us in. This mistake wouldn't have been fatal if a man in the crowd hadn't taken my opponent by the cloak, yelling senseless inarticulate curses, and jerked them off balance.

The moment, although brief, gives me a heartbeat's opening which makes all the difference, turning the momentum about-face, and redistributing the advantage. My fist at last connects. In the back of my mind, I perceive that the sound of my fist sounds different from the sound of theirs; that theirs is the sound of hollow, objective contact; mine the solid, personal thud of bone against bone. My knuckles weep a new fresh gush of blood.

My reflection is soundless, absorbing the punch without objection, passively accepting it. Then I thrust out a windmill kick, my foot cracking against skull, and the head is nearly thrown off the shoulders, whipping across the body, however still attached to the neck, in a kind of bloodless decapitation. My opponent falls to the ground. They roll once. Then I spring and capture them under my legs and, grabbing them by the shoulders, I pin them still. We're both drowning under our thick, breathless violence, chests pumping as we pant under our identical paper masks. Through my empty, paper eyes, I glare down at my mirror-image.

 _You're wearing my face. Take it off._

I catch beneath the mask and my opponent doesn't struggle, lying unresponsively, with my fingers clenching under the papier-mâché. I fling it aside. The mirror is cracked; the illusion falls away. We aren't the same, I realize.

The face underneath is damaged; gossamer white bandages are wrapped around the eyes, above the bridge of nose, and I see the mouth, which is thinner than mine, a rigid knife-edge of somberness and melancholy. Inexpressive as iron. And I think about my own mouth, I think about the times I've seen it reflected at me, always soft and always ready, in the corners of my lips, to shape to the deepest of my emotions, as though my heart resides there under the swell of my bottom lip, waiting, but rarely pulled from its paper-blank flatness. That's the difference between my mouth and this one. Mine is waiting. This one is fleshless iron.

So I stare at the solemn lines of those lips, trying to identify them.

Underneath my legs and hands, I feel, matching the rigid, knifelike mouth, iron plates in the chest and iron solidity in the thighs, and I know these are the proportions of a man because in these areas a woman is softened. I lift my hand and, thoughtlessly, put it on his cheek. Yes, a man indeed. I can feel the abrasiveness of a man's jaw where he has cleanly scraped the stubble away. Then the man's mouth moves, the two lips coming open upon a word, and I lean forward to listen, watching with a strange, scalpel-like attention the parting of those lips as they form to a sound, but I don't hear the voice for the crowd has broken into shouts: "Military Police! It's the MP! MPs are coming!"

The man's head turns, as though he can see beyond the bandages wrapping his eyes, watching the panic stir the crowd into a clattering uproar. Ignoring the shouts, I don't look away from him.

 _Why did you wear my face?_

 _Who are you?_

Untouched by the panic, my hand, firm against his face, cups his jawbone and I feel the muscles flexing around the joint. Tension branches though this man like tightly braided rope, and for some reason, I want to use my fingers to undo the plaits and let them loose. Then, out of a more reasonable curiosity, I feel the urge to take away the bandages and see what lies underneath.

When his hand comes over mine, I think for a second that he's feeling my hand on his skin, pressing the lines of my palm flat to his cheek. But he takes my hand away and shoulders me aside, so he can sit up. Dazed, I scrutinize his every move. He has a strong, bare throat, and a chin that tapers away. The two outlines of eye sockets, which lay under the material of the bandages, appear to stare at me, seeing past the fabric and into my eyes. I return that blind, eyeless stare with equal intensity.

The sound of a gun going off jolts me to my wits. I jerk my head around. Faceless forms dart around; in every direction pant legs blur with wild, nonsensical fleeing, aimless, like a quiver of arrows shot recklessly into the dark. Among the darting shapes, the flash of silver flicks between one body and the next in a fleeting keyhole of gunmetal. Springing to my feet, I avoid the proximity in which I've caught glimpse of the shotgun and run toward the ticket booth where the prize money still sits, unattended. Seizing it, I'm running now, with the bag of money clutched in my hand, running, running, running—

I don't even look back for the man who wore my face. By the mechanics of my survival instinct, I run.

Around the corner I turn, down the alley, sprinting, whisking up puffs of dust under foot. My shadow flies, soaring as it often does, along the street. My side burns with the imprint of a cruel, savage fist bruised hot into my flesh. Ignoring the raw inflammation, my hair blowing back behind me, I continue running toward my goal—the One True North of my life—the place where I must repay my debt.

My stamina wanes. I start to feel the molten metal of exertion running down my lungs and down my thighs, and I push through it, controlling my breath. The farther I run, the more the swift, rhythmic clapping of my footsteps starts to sound like a hopeless vicious cycle; a haunting, mournful epithet of _So-rry, So-rry, So-rry, So-rry_.

I am so sorry.

The rhythmic clapping then becomes an echo to the question I could spend my whole life answering— _What are you, then? — So-rry, So-rry, So-rry, So-rry._ The running, haunting epithet ricochets across each building I pass, my grip tight around the stolen money. _So-rry, So-rry, I am so —_

Something flickers at the edge of my vision—my head swings around—and I'm airborne, suddenly, abruptly, knocked hard into the side of the alley.

My eyes roll back in a blind stupor, my body, sagged and caked with dust, rumpled against the wall like a heap of dirty laundry. My body feels, suddenly, all worn out like a pair of dull, hand-me-down trousers, hardly held together by straining seams. I wish I could shed it like a costume and put on something less broken.

Emerging from the intersection, ducking out of a corner, the MP who had blindsided me approaches, and I watch, prostrated, my mask sitting skewed on my face. He seizes me by the collar, lifting me bodily from the ground, and I hang there, dead and limp. He has typical, unexceptional eyes, the shallow eyes of someone who has very little innovative or independent thought. Holding me up with one hand, he exploits my injury and slams his knuckles into my bruised ribs. I shrivel like a writhing insect, clamping off my breath, so as not to cry out.

He releases my collar and I land in a crouch, gripping my screaming side, my head bent over. I grind my teeth hard against the pain. Heavy, thudding footsteps approach rapidly, and beneath my mask, I catch a surreptitious glance of two more big-shouldered MPs coming toward us. With great effort, I rise to my feet, holding my side, my head still bent over.

The unremarkable MP reaches for me again. Bold, knuckle-hair springs up from his thick, masculine fingers, and slivers of grime rim the square fingernails. The hand reaches beyond me—my view is overcome by palm lines and calluses—then an oppressive weight bears down on my mask. The papier-mâché mold impresses on the surface of my face. The mask comes away.

The MPs stare at me. The one holding my mask has gone stock-still with amazement. A woman, they say, she's a woman. They discuss my womanness, still amazed, looking me over, and as they discuss my womanness, their eyes begin to change. Their indiscriminate, careless attention gives way to wolfish, glinting, black-beetle scrutiny, picking me apart until I'm reduced to nothing but individual body parts, and then I feel their thoughts reaching like salivating tongues to the bare skin beneath my clothing because men, when a woman becomes involved, can't think with their heads, thinking instead with their biology.

I feel myself burn with ferocious, disgusted shame, and then I start to cringe away from their black-beetle stares. I flatten to the wall, my eyes widening. The chemicals of adrenaline refine my pupil to the acutest pinpoint vision, the world becoming crisp and lucid and magnified—I see myself, flat, cringing, paper-blank, caught in the shallow, unmemorable glass eyes of the MP, and seeing myself caught there, helpless, I extrapolate the image, seeing myself and the MP and the other MPs and the hellish street fighting ring and I am only paper, and they start to fold me into shapes that I don't want to be. I see this all within the unremarkable eyes of the MP because I'm helpless, caught on the surface of his retina.

Then beyond the MP, at the boundaries of the scene, I locate another piece in this game. Across the alley from me, on top of the roof, crouches the man with the fleshless iron mouth and the bandaged eye-sockets. His black liquid cloak eddies gently across his shoulders. He's motionless.

. . . this changes things . . . didn't know she was a woman . . . worth more than three years' pay . . .

Against a sky smeared with sundown, the man with the iron mouth is but a dimensionless silhouette, as though cut from a black paper card and pasted there on the rooftop. The air stills, becoming breathless now, and the cloak does not quiver, a flat, immobile smudge of ink. My eyes fix to his shape, as though anchored there, again, by steel wires. I can't look away. A hard, unsolicited hand pushes the hair that sweeps over my left eyebrow, away from my forehead, thrusting my naked face into full disclosure. I cringe back into the brick wall behind me.

. . . a looker, ain't she? . . . no one will know . . .

Burning, I throw a fist with wild abandon. I hit the MP soldier in the throat and feel under my split-knuckles, the Adam's apple crush down into the windpipe, punching out of him a futile, choking, airless gasp. With both hands, the MP clutches at his neck. Arteries bulge from his skin in strained cords, and across the whites of his eyes, blood bursts forth, his dark blue irises submerging in terrific, red pools of asphyxiation.

Leaping around him, with a sure, metallic click, I flick out my switch from the back of my belt. Immediately, the metal reacquaints with my palm and the rot within me re-appropriates my body—and now I know what I hadn't been certain of yesterday.

I intend to kill someone.

This time, seized by my ugly rot, I wield the violence twisted in me without hesitation and plunge my switch at the other MP with the fatal purpose of severing that carotid artery, seeing in my mind's eye, my blade coming out the other side of his neck, red and hot, a spray of blood exploding from his opened throat, and his body emptying until the last vestiges of life pulse out of him in slowing throbs as all his vital color drains away to a dead-white powdery bloodlessness. My blade closes in on its mark, slashing toward the defenseless throat column below the stubbled chin. But then another blade cuts between my knife and its target, intercepting the attack. The two silver slats of metal hold together in a deadlock of mirrored unforgiveness.

By the quivering deadlock alone, I know who's at the other end of my blade. And even before I begin to lift my eyes, I know what I will see in front of me: the oval outlines of bandaged eye-sockets glaring profoundly into my face. _Goddammit_. Baring my teeth, growling out a thwarted snarl of unfulfillment, knowing that I cannot win against this guy, I let my knife grind off his, our blades hissing with stubborn resistance, and launch down the street, pumping my arms and legs into a swift escape.

Before I can get very far, the third MP solider swings a baton at me and, just as I tear past him, the butt of the bat catches the back of my skull. Too surprised to cry out, I stagger forward, my vision winking out into the dark purple haze of head trauma. But because I'm always, always running toward my One True North, I don't fall. My fingertips touch the ground, and by the mechanics of my survival instinct, I smoothly assimilate to the veered momentum, still running. The dark purple haze clears away, and I realign my balance, stumbling into a headlong sprint. My shadow flies on, undeterred.

 **VIII.**

Consciousness comes in the ebb and flow of a concussion. I am, in fact, concussed. I'm in painless oblivion. Then, in a rolling high-tide of brief wakefulness, I open my eyes. I perceive a looming gambrel roof above me; the thick, sweet, damp smell of hay; and a dull sledgehammer pounding in my head. Then the reflux black nothing of sleep takes me away again, dissolving my every shred of almost-awareness.

After some interminable passing of time, another flow of wakefulness comes over me, and the world boils back to my consciousness. I see the gambrel roof, smell the hay, feel the sledgehammer; and through my dimmed, enfeebled vision, I also see the man with the bandaged eyes. He's sitting at a vantage, on a bale of hay, using a rag to wipe his knife.

"You're no better than that mangy mutt." His voice is low and cold, and within it resides a familiar dry irony and an intelligent stillness. "Curled up in a strange place to take a nap; it's something a stray dog would do."

A soft, dying light leaks through the cracks of the barn and glints off the metal of his knife, striking the blade into silver, sporadic flashes in the shadows. The knife glimmers like a long minnow darting through a murky pond. He starts to use the tip of it to clean under his fingernails. "Or perhaps this is someplace special to you. Is that the reason you stayed awake till you could crawl inside this shithole?"

My eyeballs lift into my skull. Warm, dizzying splotches of blood press against the forefront of my cranium. I sigh out a soundless groan and, lifting my head, straining forward, I squint against the dull, drumming throb behind my eyeballs. From my half-crunched up position, I see my own chest rising and falling with the full-bellied breaths of one deep in sleep. Beyond my incapacitated body is the man with the bandaged eyes, still sitting on a block of hay, in profile to me, hunched over his pretty, glittering knife.

The liquid cloak has been shed, laying in a puddle on the ground, and he wears a plain black shirt and plain black pants and worn black combat boots. His body is strong, I knew that already. But now I see for myself the hard, cut muscle pulling at his shirtsleeves, his iron chest plates pushing up against the shirtfront, and hunched over as he is, I see the taut, muscled curve of his back disclosing itself through the shirt fabric. Contrary to what one would expect, all this imposing strength has been tightly packed inside an abbreviated, compact vessel; he's a rather short man. Shorter than me, even.

The shape of him imprints onto the surface of my eye and, losing my weak toehold in reality, I sink against the floor with the outline of him swimming vaguely behind my eyelids.

"Whoops, my mistake," he says, in an indifferent, inflectionless un-apology. His voice is incredibly far away. "Guess you're still dozing off. Don't mind me, then." The reflux of the concussion drags me down again, into the depths of an empty, black nothing. The vague, swimming shape of him follows me under.

I'm woken by a couple mild but brisk pats on my cheek. "All right, little stray. That's enough sleep. If I wait any longer, I'll be older than your great uncle." The hand not patting me awake is wrapped around the back of my head, lifting my face off the ground. My eyes come open—only partway—upon the ubiquitous, profound, concealed eye-sockets. The front of limp, dark hair falls over the gossamer bandages.

"Besides," he goes on. And still caught under the weight of a slow and heavy half-consciousness, I stare dumbly at his fleshless iron mouth, watching with that strange, scalpel-like attention, the movement of his speaking, as though I can't comprehend his words by hearing them alone; that I must see the words on his mouth too. "I've got to make sure you're not comatose. You've caused enough trouble as it is."

Numbly, I lift my hands. I see, on my right hand, a crusty barked tree of dried blood rooted there over the knuckles. I watch those hands from an impersonal distance, disengaged, two hands that may or may not belong to me—one bloodied, one unbloodied, both long-fingered and steady—as they reach toward this man's face.

He doesn't stop me when I reach past his hair to the back of his head and begin undoing the tidy bandaging. The short, neat bristles, where his hair has been shorn off, brush the inside of my palm. I slide my fingers under the gauze, taking hold. Passing the material from hand to hand, I undo the bandages slowly. Any thought, any movement, requires industrious concentration, for the concussion still has me in its grasp.

The cloth loses grip then falls away, dropping around his cheekbones in slack white strips. Uncovered now, his thin, bluish eyelids slide open onto steady, inscrutable, pale eyes. Insomnia hangs under them in sagging, dark rings. My hands come away. I look into those familiar eyes, seeing myself in miniature, buoyed there inside the wells of his pupils.

"The money," I say at last, "where is it?"

Tugging the bandages away, letting them float to the floor in a filmy, white whisper, Captain Levi draws back from me, without expression, without sound. The hand that gives my head leverage pulls out from under my neck and I catch myself, as my body begins to fold back to the ground. He rises to his feet. I lift myself into a sitting posture, watching.

Moving to the side, Captain Levi seizes the bag of money, briskly, viciously, from where it sits behind more bales of hay. Then moving toward me again, he drops it next to my knee with the same vicious briskness, letting it hit the dirt with a heavy, brassy, emphatic thud. On impact, coin and cash tumble out of it. The paper bills blow across the ground.

"That all you want?" he says. I scrabble for the bills before they can drift into a wider scatter, shoving the money back into the bag. Under the captain's authoritative, all-seeing glare, I feel tiny and insignificant. "If it's money you're after, perhaps you should take advice from those MP pigs. Three years' worth of pay, was it?"

As though I've been slugged in the gut, I draw in a short, startled breath. My hands are slower, scooping the coins back into the bag, and though his words have injured me, I smile. It's a flat, mute smile that says nothing of my inward injury. "How cruel," I say. I continue bagging the spilled money. My movements are dragging and small.

"Tell me, then. What are your true intentions?"

"This place belongs to a friend of mine. That's my reason for coming here."

"So all this . . . for a play-date?"

Sitting on my knees, unsmiling now, I look at him. Each coin has been put away in the bag, and my hands are motionless. "She's dead," I tell him, and even after all this time, a cold, debilitating shock follows the truth. Beth is gone. My eyes go wide with disbelief, but my voice is quiet and detached. "Titans killed her."

Captain Levi says nothing. I don't know why, but I feel that his eyes, while nothing like those MPs' black-beetle stares, are dissecting me; examining one fragment after another; disassembling my body into my short black hair and mute, hazel eyes and soft, ready mouth and unreliable, bloody hands; to piece me together again into a coherent, complete being. This is Janice Robin. I am Janice Robin. The captain turns away.

Leaning onto my hands, I pull my weight forward, onto my feet. I wipe my palms on my pants. The bruise on my side screams. Captain Levi's fist remains there, imbedded in my rib bones. Standing, I see, strapped to Captain Levi's calf, the pretty, glittering knife.

"How are you feeling?" he says. His voice is placid and quiet in this empty, desolate barn. We're entirely alone, closed in by dilapidated barren stables. The place is empty. Yet, still close and thick in the air, hang the smells of horses' working sweat and the sweet-grass breath of cattle, as though the barn now hosts farm animal ghosts.

"I'm all right," I say, tearing my gaze from his strapped calf.

"That's good, then." Bending at the waist, Captain Levi snatches up his cloak from the ground and shakes away the dirt. It showers down with a grainy hiss. Turning, he spins it out, in a flowing liquid-swell, around his shoulders and clasps it closed. "We're heading back."

"I still have a debt to pay."

His back is turned to me, so I can't see his face. Instead, I watch the meticulous trim of his black hair, staring at the shaven part of his head. He becomes very still. "It's an illusion," he says. "It's all in your head." That suspends between us, motionless.

"It's real to me," I tell him earnestly. My debt is real to _me_.

"I'm sure it is." He begins walking toward the barn's bolted double doors.

"Captain Levi . . ."

Although I add nothing more to his name, he stops, and without turning to me, he begins speaking again, his voice carrying across the barn, sourceless, without volume or force, in a low disembodied sound that feels more like a steady, absent silence. "Listen to me and listen well. No amount of money will relieve the weight of an encumbered conscience. Whatever debt you've invented in that broken mind of yours, it's an infinite void that will never be filled. Don't you understand that?"

"But I have the money right here, right now. I may as well follow through."

"Fine. Do as you want. I won't stop you, however meaningless your actions will be." He continues walking and, with both hands flung out, flat-palmed, he pushes open the double doors. In a rusty-hinged clash, they give onto a heavy, moonlit night. "You've got thirty minutes. If you're not back by then, don't bother returning at all." He moves out the doors. The panels thud shut behind his cold, flat, final word: "The Survey Corps is no shelter for stray dogs."

With the final word and the final sound of closing doors, the feeble light of the moon is sucked out of the barn altogether, plunging me into a black, wandering blindness.


	3. Chapter 3

**IX.**

I'm caught in a vicious circle, I know this. When I think about my own thoughts, I understand they're going around and around, running, going nowhere at all. It reminds me of a spinning silver dollar. On one side is my reason, on the other my illusion, and it spins so fast that one blurs into the other. I can't discern where the dimensions of reality and the dimensions of illusion lay; where pure and impure reside; certainty and uncertainty. And death too, the ultimate illusion. Perhaps I am already dead. And perhaps, somewhere, Beth is still alive.

I resist Captain Levi's verbal slap to break me out of the vicious circle. I continue on, staring through a casement window into a drowsing, lightless room. Images begin to stir:

( _the fireplace roars strong, warming, so different from the destructive blaze of a wildfire, wrapping us up in a soft, close light that makes empty space lose its unbridgeable vastness, Pappy is narrating an anecdote, and Nana clucks her tongue, inserting this and that annotation, mostly amending biases, "That ain't how it went, you big fat fibber. Don't listen to his bullgarbage, girls," Beth laughs, a weightless, dynamic laugh, and I grin into the fire, watching the pulsing rhythm of crackling flames, feeling very warm)_

The images begin to waver like the softest light of a candle; then they whiff out altogether, and I return to the drowsing, lightless room. Inside, a dark, sleeping hearth gapes like an open mouth and within it, the wrought iron teeth of a dead fireplace grate. There are no bodies filling the furniture, and my face is slack in its default paper-blank slate. How long has it been since I've felt warm? How long? It's because of the blight, I think. It's because of the stinking rot, manifested there on my back in a cold, pale slant of mutilated tissue. That's what it is, I decide. It's the scar.

"We don't have time to stand around," says Captain Levi, a distance behind me.

I don't move, the bag of money grasped futilely in my hand. The captain watches the back of my head as I stare blankly into the room. The spark of a faint memory strikes up behind my eyes and then wavers away again before the colors and sounds can coalesce and take form.

When the captain speaks again, his voice projects from a nearer point, moving like the bodiless voice of an apparition, floating toward me until it's just behind my shoulder. "Loss is like a sieve," he says, coming closer. "You can try to fill it with something. But it'll only sift through like sand. And then you'll be left with nothing, but the consequences of the choices you've made. And you've made a shit mess, Janice Robin. Now I'll have to be the one to clean it up."

The nape of my neck clenches up at the immediacy of his voice, right there behind me. "Is that why you're here," I say, "to clean up my mess?"

"That's right. You didn't consider how your choices might inconvenience others. When you set off for that street fight, I'd wager you were thinking only of yourself." At my ear, not quite touching me, his voice is low, calm, barbed by that intelligent dry irony. The coolness of his breath nearly stirs my hair. "How selfish."

The nape of my neck is clenched up, braced against Captain Levi's linguistic version of beating me to my senses. I imagine his strong, steady hand from the wrist down, reaching from out of a black nothing, to flick the spinning dollar of my thoughts, settling it once and for all onto one side, forcing me to face whichever side it yields: illusion or reality.

On the glass of the casement window, the faint reflection of my face shines out. My eyes are fastened wide, my pupils pinprick small. My hair is swept across my left eyebrow. Faintly, slowly at first, the numbed muscles of my flat, mute face begin to twitch.

 _How selfish . . ._

People who feel nothing seek out anything to feeling something. But people who feel everything, what do they do? When they are bursting at the seams, how do they alleviate the strain?

I feel nothing.

And then I feel everything.

I don't know which is better.

My fist smashes down into the farmhouse wall. Eyes shut, I breathe through my nose. The inrush of oxygen hitches a ride on the back of pain to assuage the emotional turbulence inside me. My face steadies into its flat muteness once more. Now that I can think again, I open my eyes upon my faint reflection in the window.

Captain Levi takes me by the wrist. I snatch my hand away. My fingers are trembling. I don't feel it. My open knuckles are a weeping tree with roots rumpling across my bones and drooping branches bleeding down my hand.

"I see, now." The captain is as calm as ever, with his astute eyes, slightly widened, pinned on my reflection's face. "I haven't given you enough credit. Your mind's unstable, isn't that right? You're coming unhinged."

I turn to him, away from my reflection. My eyes lift to the sky where an infinity of stars bear down on me. In that instant, the immensity of countless constellations imposes a weight unbearable on my bones. I feel myself becoming infinitely small beneath a great juggernaut of careening light. These stars will roll over and pulverize me into meaningless powder, scattering my existence infinitesimally across time. My heart begins to seize in fear of becoming too small. With a trembling hand, I push my hair behind my ear. Captain Levi seizes my wrist.

"Idiot." His voice is all tones, no volume. "You're getting hair in it." Threads of hair drag across my knuckles, sticking in my wet blood as he snaps my hand down, palm up, in front of him, yielding the defenseless underside of my forearm. A delicate blue vein runs, just underneath the skin of my naked wrist. The captain looks at me. My attention has closed-in on the jumping, blue vein.

"How long have you been this way?" he says, still an intonation, rather than a spoken question.

"I think that I've always been this way . . . or at least since I can remember."

For a long time, he says nothing, with my wrist inside his hand, my blue vein jumping against the pad of his thumb. There's iron closed down behind Captain Levi's face. Finally, he says, in undertone, "Yes, I would imagine so."

He takes the bandages that had been bound around his eyes and grasps my wrist again and begins to wrap my knuckles. As he dresses the wound, his hands are not soft and they're not warm, possessed by an impersonal, mechanical response to injury, the same hands of a medical practitioner. "If you were in your right mind, you wouldn't have enlisted into the Survey Corps. Only an abnormal person would willingly race into hell." He finishes off by tying the bandages neatly together. Turning my hand over and back again, I admire his handiwork with too much wonder. He doesn't look at me, looking instead at the dark stamp of my knuckles on the farmhouse wall. "At any rate, your carelessness is unacceptable."

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry for inconveniencing you."

"When we return to HQ, you'll be formally disciplined."

"Yes, sir."

"And about that busted hand of yours, care for it properly, will you?"

I nod my head, saying nothing.

At the absence of verbal compliance, he stays his eyes on mine. I look away, my posture stiffening to a formal vertical. "Yes, sir. I will."

I hear the motion of his breath, a microscopic sound, and his hands moving again, rising to the window. The glass shows our faint images in pale, refracted light, like two faded memories moving behind the lens of an eye. His hands steadily work at the window, but withstanding inertia resists his steady pulling. The cords in his overturned forearms stand out like taut wire. In a short interval, though, I hear a quiet sound of release, and then the tenacious casement gives way, relinquishing a gasping inch of space between the glass and wood frame. The captain wipes his hands together once, soundlessly clapping away any dust. Then he inverts his head, looking behind his shoulder at me. I can't make out his expression in the darkness. But I can see where the night shears off his pale irises.

"This is what you came for, right?" he says. "You're wasting time. We don't have all night."

I tighten my grip on the money.

He opens the window a bit wider, giving me enough passage to slip through. I put the money on the kitchen table, and as I double back through the farm house, the familiar home displaces dust motes of memories from the floors of my mind. They float up behind my eyes and I stumble around, disoriented by a thick dust-cloud of memory, picking my way back toward the window, trying not to remember. Through the glass, I see Captain Levi watching me, wrapped by the heavy, black night miles away. My legs become numbed—and I strain to a halt, my heart thudding like a fist in my chest.

I find the captain's pale eyes, shining out like hard pieces of silver, and let the retracting wires attached to my retinas move me toward him. When I come to the window, I crane my head through, reaching out for his hand. His fingers wrap my palm and his other hand comes around my armpit. He brings me out of the window, lifting me up, as though I weigh nothing at all, and steadies me on my two lead feet. Shaking away the dust mote images, disoriented, I reach around and take his shoulder. In a moment of unsteadiness, I borrow his solid backbone, using it as a pillar to brace myself on. I shut my eyes against the remembering.

The remembering plays out in the darkness of my eyelids. I heave myself away from Captain Levi, spinning around, to put my palms on the farmhouse wall. My head drops between my shoulders. I taste fear in the back of my throat.

It's okay, It's okay, Shhhh, Everything will be all right . . .

It won't be. But I lie to myself—and make myself believe it. My breath returns to me. I cease shaking. A hand comes around my bicep and I let myself be pulled away from the wall. Captain Levi wraps my arm around his shoulders and leans support into my side. He walks me away from the farmhouse.

"I'm all right," I say. "You can let go."

He does. And without breaking stride, I straighten my posture, continuing. The night is heavy and thick, even with the moon's uncertain appearance. It comes in and out between clouds. The clash of a closing door behind us gives the captain pause. I keep going. I hear the small whispering movement of his hand, lifting behind me. I nearly turn to evade it, but out of respect for his authority, I instead let him stay me with a steady, firm clasp on my shoulder, my feet pausing in walking stride. A gasp of night air sheds across the back of my neck. The hair is displaced from my nape.

"Janice. Janice Robin, is that you?"

I jerk my head around—and start to shake inside myself. Captain Levi stares at me. They're all staring at me. I feel my emotions begin to boil up from an abscess of suppression and restraint and rise to the top of my chest, like all the breath I couldn't breathe is sitting solidly on my sternum.

I start to make soft sounds. They don't hear me. Spinning around, I turn my face away from them and continue making soft sounds. I know I'm speaking to them—or at least trying to. But I hear my clapping, running footsteps above all else.

I start to count in my head. One, for paper soldier. Two, for stray dog. Three, for _So-rry, So-rry, So-rry._ Four, for unstable. Five . . .

I feel two arms come around me. "Child, how long have you been holding onto this?"

I start to make those soft sounds again, trying to speak.

"Hush, now. Never mind that. Oh, how good it is to see you." She squeezes me tight. "My you've grown. Look at all that muscle. Pappy, come here. Come see how big our little robin has gotten." Pappy embraces me too. His scruffy cheeks are wet.

"Our little robin," they call me.

Five, for little robin.

I breathe in the flour of Nana's hair and clasp Pappy's hand, and I feel that I don't deserve to be here, that I'm not ready. That I'm still circling, and their compassion will be too much to endure. I'm not ready to be forgiven. I'm not ready to be loved again. Not by them. Not without Beth.

"Who's this?" says Nana, smiling at the man in my company. I turn to look at him.

I don't know. This man with the somber mouth and the inscrutable, steady eyes and the immobile face. I don't know.

Pappy leans over to say something, below his breath, close to my ear. "Not your boyfriend, I hope. He looks untrustworthy."

"What?—No—Pappy—" I stammer. Then louder, steadier, I explain: "This is my commanding officer, Captain Levi."

Pappy looks at him through the lens of this new knowledge. "Captain Levi . . . that name . . . I do believe Beth told us about you. You're that invincible soldier. You're—you're—"

"Humanity's Strongest," Nana says, smiling calmly. She's graceful and composed, looking regal despite her ratty nightgown, with her hands folded neatly in front of her skirt.

"Our apologies." Pappy shows his bare head, bowing it in respect. "Shoulda recognized you. It's just you're not as . . . imposing as I imagined you'd be."

Captain Levi nods an acknowledgement. Nana is a bit more tactful when she speaks to him. "Did you know our granddaughter Beth Crow? Is that why you're here with our little robin?"

I search his face. It reveals nothing. Despite that, I hear his voice in my head with such palpability that a cold wash of guilt rolls through my stomach. _Not really,_ I can hear him saying, _I caught a foul scent and followed the trail to a troublesome stray dog._ It is the wordlessness on his mouth that convinces me he hasn't really spoken.

Saying nothing, he reaches under his cloak, and when his hand returns, he's clasping a Wings of Freedom crest. His eyes level on Nana and then Pappy as he speaks in that low, insubstantial voice of his. "Your granddaughter offered up her heart to the Survey Corps, believing that one day this world would be free from titans. She had the courage to fight for that future. Beth Crow was special."

Receiving the crest from the captain's hand, Nana and Pappy embrace and start to cry all over again. And as I watch them, I realize Captain Levi has just fulfilled every parent's unspoken wish to have their suspicions confirmed, that their child is indeed special. I clasp my hand to my chest and feel a strange, weightless warmth there, under my heart.

 **X.**

Nana and Pappy have provided Captain Levi and me with a horse, although I had resisted. I remember, at one time, not too long ago, a beating vein of life had run through their barn and through their home. But it seems that beating vein had been inextricably connected to Beth's heart. The farm couldn't sustain itself without the crutch of her energy—and without the economic relief of her military paycheck.

The stolen bag of money sits on their kitchen table.

On the return to HQ, I sit behind the captain, my hands clenched beneath the saddle, leaned away from his erect, indomitable backbone. I watch the skittish company of the moon, appearing and disappearing under the slide of rainless clouds. In the pale illumination, the captain's hair acquires a blue sheen, turning ink-black again with the light's retreat. The night is quiet—and we haven't disrupted that quiet since we left, listening to the silence and the steady cadence of horse hooves.

"Captain Levi," I say quietly. "You were very kind back there." He says nothing to this. I fluctuate behind him with the swing of the horse's gait. I'd forgotten people could be kind, and its unbidden appearance has surprised me. "Where did you get that crest?"

"It was yours."

"Why'd you have my crest?"

"To make a point." There's a hitch in our conversation, as there's bound to be between two pithy people. But I push through it, muttering out the next obvious question.

"Did you happen to make that point? Because it may have been lost on me, I'm not sure."

"After I personally approached you about your misconduct, you ran off by yourself anyway. That in and of itself requires an exceptional brand of boldness."

"To be fair, you said I was under _suspect_ of gambling and street fighting, which is distinctly different from being charged with it. I'm actually a timid person by nature."

"You're an idiot, aren't you?"

"I don't like to think so."

"In any case, your discharge was discussed and then decided."

"I'm being discharged?"

"No." I wait for him to elaborate. He doesn't.

"What's going to happen?"

"You won't be discharged as of right now. It seems your situation has changed, though it's a lateral move."

"So . . . I'll still probably be discharged."

"Yeah."

I look at the night. The moon has disappeared. I wait for my gut to sink with guilt or anxiety. The moon reappears. There's nothing inside me.

"How's your hand feeling?"

"It's all right."

"And your injured side?"

"It's fine, too."

"Good, then. 'Cause tomorrow you'll be in for hell."

 **XI.**

Still caught by the hand of drowsiness, I have been ushered outside, my eyes bleary and barely open. The sun as well hasn't opened its eye yet, still lazing below the grassy plateau, which extends all the way to the distant wall that looks, from here, like a long, brown earth worm after a rain, caught above ground, helpless as the day begins to bake it dry. I had been ordered to run—and haven't been ordered to stop since then.

The sun is now directly over my head, glaring down at me, through an angry, oppressive glare. My clothes are sealed to my body with salt, and I feel that my skin may melt off me, like slow broiled meat sliding off a rib bone.

When I had first started to run, it had come easily. And then the first slump of exhaustion had hit. I pushed through it, however, with molten metal running over my lungs and legs, ablaze with exhaustion. My every fiber and every particle had resisted the onward momentum that I willfully sustained. Now that same onward momentum thrusts my legs in an unceasing run, running, unable to stop, as though a screw has come loose from a wheel and the wheel has spiraled out of control. I can't stop now, even if I want to.

The footpath, which comes around in a winding loop, has been pounded bald by my own running. The impressed track of my ceaseless feet leads me around and around. Realizing this, I suddenly zoom-out from my body, seeing myself from a vantage, high in the blue sky. I'm moving in circles like a rat. Going nowhere at all. Following the downward spiral of my own sanity, down, down, down . . .

Coming unhinged.

My legs cease moving, but the momentum pushes onward, despite my boneless, motionless legs, going up my stomach and up my esophagus, the ceaseless onward motion heaving through my abdominal muscles. It goes on past me, out of my body, doubling me over, flooding my mouth and then pouring out my throat in aggressive purges, my stomach muscles clenching with the nonstop momentum. I go to my hands and knees. The ground glistens with my stomach acid.

I sob for air, my stomach muscles still clenching up and squeezing bile out of me, though I've already been hollowed out and emptied. My stomach heaves up a guttural groan, and profusions of thick, dehydrated drool stream down my chin.

A water canteen is thrust at me. I shake my head.

"Drink."

I shake my head again, scrubbing my hand across my mouth.

" _Drink_."

On my hands and knees, I drop my head like a weight. Five fingers wrap my skull and jerk my head back. The canteen is thrust against my lips. Water begins pouring into my mouth before my mind apprehends I'm about to be filled with liquid rather than air. My unsuspecting lungs take down the water, shocked into stuttering spasms when I begin to drown. I splutter and choke. The canteen is taken away. I splutter and choke some more, my lungs still stuttering, trying to dislodge a chip of water wedged in my throat. Physiological tears leak out the corner of my eyes. I begin to gasp then, my lungs taking in all the air they can and but never quite filling, in a kind of bottomless suffocation.

This time the hand takes me by the chin and lifts my face that way, the canteen slanted carefully against my bottom lip. I take in a few gulps. Two little streams run from the corners of my mouth. The canteen goes away, and then the hand lifting my chin goes away, and my head hangs once again, from the stalk of my neck, slack and heavy as a weight. I am too tired to care that drool dribbles from my face, like a silver thread spun by a spider, connecting my lips to the grass. I spit. My saliva sprays out under me.

"You've got a ten-minute respite," Captain Levi says. "Make the best of it. You've got a long way to go yet, little stray."

Hell, I realize, has no pity.

And neither does Captain Levi.

"Petra, help her stretch out."

I turn my head to the side, watching his back move away, growing distant. He's shirtless and wearing shorts. His strong calves tense with each step, the distinct bands of muscle in his legs standing out, then sinking away again, in tandem with his steady, gliding gait.

"It's nice to meet you, Janice. I'm Petra Ral."

I lift my face. Bent over me with the sun behind her, the young woman speaking to me has a slender face and in it is a kind of gentle, heatless illumination. She has miraculous amber glass for eyes and a soft, flattering mouth.

"Petra, then."

She smiles and tells me to sit with my legs extended together in front of me. I do. She leans her palms on my back, shifting a crescendo of weight behind her hands. My outstretched fingers ease toward the jut of my toes, tension gently coaxed from my hamstrings and quads.

"He doesn't provide much cushion for error," I say.

I can't see her, but her palms are small and firm on my back.

"I know the captain doesn't exactly measure up to the standards society holds him to."

"He doesn't exactly measure up, regardless."

"Yes, well, that too." She makes a sound in her throat and takes my arms, pushing my elbows in, lifting them that way. My shoulders blades squeeze together. "He can be harsh—and his methods a bit extreme. But he's not a bad person. He truly isn't. He treats us fair. And he cares very much about his subordinates. More than he lets on."

Knowing this already, I nod my head.

"I believe his rough edges are a product of the time he spent in the underground," she continues. "He was born there, raised there. Wrought by an environment far away from the sun. I can't imagine a place like that. And now he's here, in the upperground, carrying those shadows with him. Somehow, I feel that I know those underground slums, just by looking at him."

I don't reply right away, taking the time to reflect on this new information. I look at her, locating in her tone an indicative earnest lilt. Her face is bright in the sun, her hair struck into fiery red highlight. She's petite, smaller than me. Smaller than Captain Levi. A convenient geometric alignment, I think.

"Are you and him . . ." I begin, letting an inflection of exaggerated curiosity carry an unsaid significance. She blushes fiercely.

"Oh, no, no—he's my commanding officer."

"Is he really?"

"Yes! He's the captain!"

I smile my mute smile and let her fret and blush under the insinuation for a while. Then I put my hand on her arm. "It was a joke."

"Oh, yes, right." She squeezes out a laugh. I decide I like her, and imagine her and Captain Levi together: She's tucked into his side, fitting to the space along his thigh and up to his shoulder, and the gentle illumination in her face transfers to him, like flames leaping across a dry field, catching fire, chasing out the darkness behind his eyes. He appears young, luminous.

"But I do think," I go on patiently, "a person like you would be good for him. And I don't say that lightly."

Petra smiles. "I'm comfortable with how things are."

"You don't want something more?"

"I don't know, really. I don't—" She lets go a long breath. "Lie down and give me your leg." I do. She seizes me by the calf and manipulates my muscles, pushing my knee to my chest. I close my eyes and let myself exhale profoundly. Behind my eyelids, I see Hannah and Franz kissing, then Hannah melts into Petra and Franz melts into . . .

My eyes come open upon blue sky. Franz remains in faded outline. Captain Levi doesn't appear. I turn my head to the side.

In the distance are two chin-up towers, both employed. On one, hangs a long man with pale, ashy hair. On the other, hangs the miniature white smudge of the captain. His muscles pull into taut swells, as his feet lift off the ground, gliding, until the underside of his chin touches the bar. He lowers down again, slowly, controlled, and suspends, knees at a bend, with his ankles crossed together. I watch him move up again, steadily, touch his chin, move down again. The motion is without resistance. I don't know if he's the one moving or if it's the sky and the ground lifting around him. The ashy-haired man beside him looks over and seems to inwardly compete with the captain. Shortly, his arms begin to tremble and his face turns purple.

Petra says, "Why does Captain Levi call you little stray?"

"He caught me feeding a canine vagabond."

"Oh, so you like animals?"

"Occasionally."

Petra takes my other leg, leaning it into my chest. The tender bruise on my side flares. I jolt. Petra snatches her hands away.

"Did I hurt you?"

Breathing slowly, I surrender to the pain, letting it wash over me so that I can manipulate it into what I want. "Don't worry. It's fine." I work my lungs through the stitch, exhaling air through my nose. My lungs expand past the sharp bite of discomfort. It thaws to a dull knob.

"Are you injured?"

"No, I'm fine."

"Here, let me see." She reaches for my shirt. I take her hands in mine.

"Don't worry. It's only a bruise." I turn to see Captain Levi drop to his feet. His eyes squint in our direction, slanted against the glaring sun. I sit up, adding, "Besides, won't it look strange to the captain if he sees your hands reaching under my clothes?" I put my eyes on Petra's face, watching her cooling blush return to a warm, revitalized pink.

"No," she says, sounding dubious. "I don't think Captain Levi would get such strange ideas about me."

"That's very well. But he may be less certain about me. I'm a criminal, after all."

Pale amazement seizes her face, as she works to reconcile this new piece of insight with whatever impression she had of me.

"You don't look like a criminal," she says. "And you don't talk like one, either."

"Did you expect all criminals to have an unapproachable face and a vulgar mouth?" I start to heavily pull myself to my feet, but pause midway to crane my head back and look into Petra's face. I place her under the heat of my most crystallizing stare. She starts to curdle and dissolve right beneath my eyes. Before long, she forfeits a cheek.

I draw up my shoulders and continue speaking. "And who knows? Despite my lack of personality, perhaps I've seduced you. I hear I've got a fairly pretty face."

"That could be a possibility," Petra says, smiling up at me, a bit nervous, from where she sits on the ground, "except you haven't even attempted to seduce me."

"Well evidently, Miss Ral, my efforts have been too gentle." I reach down a hand and, without moving, she considers it. I give a slow blink before withdrawing my fingers, closing them individually, then retracting my wrist altogether to my chest. Too late her hand lifts from the ground to accept my invitation; my own hand has already rescinded its offer.

I turn to the empty field. I wonder what would have happened had I kept that door to camaraderie open, just a moment longer. In another timeline, another possible future, Petra Ral and I could be looking up at the stars together, and all the questions that have piled behind my teeth I could, at last, relinquish to another person who would supply an answer or at least contemplate the questions too. In that life, my mouth isn't full of thoughts I want to say but have no one to say them to.

Unhinged or not, I tell myself it's better this way—because friendship implies . . . a dog without fangs. And it implies the unfillable sieve.

As I begin to run, the switchblade pulses like a steel heart inside my pocket.

 **XII.**

"You're done for the day. Though if you don't hurry to the dining hall, you'll miss your supper. Therefore, I suggest you keep running."

A fresh, clean, comfortably dressed Captain Levi awaits at the edge of the training field. With our clashing juxtaposition, I become acutely aware of how tired and dirty I am. As my feet take me nearer, the perfume of soap and crisp laundry swims to my senses. Never have I longed for a bath this exquisitely before.

Standing there with his arms crossed, his black loafers set apart, the captain meets my imploring stare and, motionless from the neck down, he moves only his head to keep his eyes on mine as I go running by. The rigid austerity behind his expression doesn't soften. Going past, my arms pumping through the scratchy, salted stiffness of my shirt, I turn my head over my shoulder, my eyes still attached to him. The profile of his face stands out in shadow against the red, blazing sunset with his chin depressed a little and his black hair flicked across his brow like ink. His contemplative mouth is drawn down, and I think I see a place far away from the sun.

The past doesn't stay where you leave it.

It carries on.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's note: I received a nice review for this story the other day. And I suddenly remembered I had written another chapter but never posted it. I read through what I wrote. Briefly edited it. And here it is. I'm not going to be continuing this fic. This chapter was just something sitting in my computer.  
**

 **Thanks for the review. You're the reason I dug this out.**

* * *

 **XIII.**

The running path is hot and bald under my naked hands and naked knees. Faintness encroaches my vision. Heat wavers in the distance, thick as water. I'm drowning in it.

An open hand reaches into my view. I look at it, uncomprehending. Then I follow the wrist, to the elbow, to the head. Mikasa's hair falls, black and limp, around her face. Her muscled chest streams sweat. Bowed over, she waits with a patient hand held out to me. Despite her patience, I feel a temporariness. The recant of her hand impending. I watch it, I wait for it, I know it will come. The hand remains in front of me, open.

Taking hold, I let her pull me to my feet. She rests her hand by my elbow and prods me on. I put my right leg out and then the left, and then the right again, dragging forward. Mikasa jogs next to me, touching my elbow with just enough insistence that I overcome the reluctance in my knees and push on.

"Don't stop," she says.

"I'm going to die."

"Not here or now."

A few meters away, Eren is lying, outspread on his back, his chest pumping aggressively for wind.

I say, "Why are you doing this?"

"I don't know."

My legs continue to sprawl out in front of me. Her hand retracts from my elbow.

"Keep going," she says, her voice diminishing behind me. I don't turn around. I know she's returned to Eren's side.

I do as she says, and keep going.

 **XIV.**

When I look in the mirror, my cheeks have drawn into the hollows of my face and gaunt shadows show beneath my collarbones. My body has started feeding on itself, unable to sustain the intense physical labor on my insufficient diet. Wasn't there a painting I saw once? of a snake eating itself, rung around in a perfect O. I imagine cells inside my body like little snakes, their mouths slipping around their own tails in self-cannibalistic rings.

With my eyes fixed to the glass, I turn my body around, inverting my head. I flex my spine, lifting onto my toes, and bring the scar into the mirror's view. I reach over my shoulder, brandishing my nails, and use their blunt edges to scrape, lengthwise, up the rubbery lump. The stiff, bulged tissue turns a dark, irritated purple. Keeping my head inverted, straining my natural alignment, I again reach my hand around to drag my fingernails over the long, purple slant. My nails pull aggravated heat to the surface of my skin. My scar doesn't feel it: dark, deep purple and numb. Beneath that though, if I dig deep enough, I feel a miniscule pinch where the nerves cower behind scar-tissue armor.

I let my heels sink against the tile and relax the tension of my spine, realigning my head to my shoulders. I put on my clothes, rub water from my hair, and walk out the washroom.

On my way to the barracks, I see two shadows flee into the dark, gripping each other's arms, flitting through the forest, toward the little pond at the perimeter of HQ. Pausing, I follow them with my eyes.

"You don't have to look so apprehensive." I turn. Bertholdt is slanted against the corner of the men's barracks. He's a long-legged boy with a subdued presence. "It's only Franz and Hannah."

"They should be careful," I say, turning again. I stare into the shadows where they've disappeared. "Going off alone like that."

"I think they'll be fine."

"What if something happens, though? Either to us here or to them out there? What if something unexpected happens and we're all taken by surprise and somebody gets hurt because not all of us are where we're supposed to be? What if that happens?"

I hear the tall sound of Berholdt detaching himself from the barrack wall. His gargantuan palm swallows my shoulder. "I think it'll be okay. If it's any consolation, I'll stand watch. Just in case."

I nod. "I'll trust you, then."

"Sure . . ."

I start to move out from under his hand.

"Jan."

I swivel around, surprised. Nobody calls me that. Bertholdt is looking into the trees. "I think we may be alike."

"Why's that?"

"You want it too, don't you? What they have."

I give nothing away in expression or tone. "I'm sorry, but that's not true about me."

Bertholdt's face begins to change color. He leans his back against the barrack wall again, his head bent low. He seems big and small, simultaneously. "Oh. I—don't know why I assumed that. I just—"

"I don't want it because I know how it will end."

"What do you mean?"

"I think you know."

His head goes up. A pale colorlessness has driven out the embarrassed blush in his cheeks. I realize then that he's only a teenaged boy. "Goodnight, Bertholdt."

"Yes. Goodnight."

 **XV.**

"Please, don't make me run anymore."

I've placed myself prostrate on the floor before Keith Shadis. I'm in front of his boots, under the rigid fleshless glare of his eye-sockets. I put my forehead on my hands, shrinking myself into a small prayer of surrender.

"Please."

The creases around Shadis's eyes furl wider, sink deeper, so that his sockets stare at me under a cold parody of paternal sympathy. "There's no need to beg, cadet. Nobody can force you to carry out your punishment. The choice is yours. Would you like me to inform Commander Erwin of your decision?"

I shut my eyes.

 _Believe that I believe in you . . ._

I bear my teeth down against the memory and hush the voice inside my head.

When I open my eyes again, I stare at my hands, flat on the floor. The bandages on my right knuckles are blotched brown. I have to find something else to believe in, and oddly I think of Hannah and Franz. I breathe out and resign myself. "No, you have nothing to report to the commander. I'll carry out my sentence without further complaint."

"I expect to see you outside in no more than five minutes—and look forward to a supplementary thirty laps, Robin."

"Yes, sir."

I push off my hands and knees, heaving to my feet. In the darkness, I see the liquid of staring eyeballs interrogating me. Those of the other female cadets. I take off my night clothes and put on light training gear.

A few hours in, and my running is drastically different from that first day. The exhaustion has set in all the way to my bone marrow. My head flops on my shoulders and my shoulders have folded into my ribcage and my ribcage has folded into my stomach, and so I look like a scarecrow with straw limbs and a straw spine, sprawling forward step-by-step. I blink hard against a salty sting and try to lift my shoulders out of my ribs, without hindering the sprawl in my legs. I can't stop, I won't stop. I come around to the end of the loop and start to move into the beginning again, but I'm summoned by Keith Shadis.

"Stop here, cadet."

I jog off the trail and into the grass, approaching him. I reach his side, stop, and put my hands on my knees.

"Straighten up, girl. Hands on your head." I put my hands on my head, opening my ribcage, feeling my lungs expand to full capacity. I hear my roaring blood deep within my ears and I feel my heart seizing the artery in my neck.

"There they are. Bastards took their damn time. Don't they know I've got things to do?"

I follow Shadis's line of sight and see the imposing figure of Commander Erwin foisting on the backdrop of HQ, tall, broad, all hard lines and blond military haircut. If it weren't for the captain's strange fluid glide, he wouldn't possess a single shred of prominence next to the commander, diminished in presence by the long impressive shadow pulled behind the commander's heels. It's almost as if the captain himself is a shadow, brought up from the ground, depthless and impalpable. They're in uniform—and accompanying them is a shallow, unexceptional Military Police soldier. The one who had removed my mask. As they approach, I see a black bruise on the MP's throat where my fist had been.

They come to halt. I wrought myself into a salute.

The MP takes stock of me. His eyebrows are crinkled a bit and his unthoughtful eyes take in the shifted landscape of my body, perceiving the new tension in my dehydrated flesh, the gaunt strain of my collarbones and cheekbones. My skin falls from the wire hanger of my clavicle. Under his scrutiny, I don't relax my salute, thrusting my chin high and lofty.

"Damn. Looks like she's been through hell."

Commander Erwin speaks. "Do you believe this punishment befits the extent of the crime?"

"I dunno, sure. She's not the first soldier to dabble in street fighting. I'd heard you Scouts were a bunch of hard asses. But— It's only been a couple days, and look at her. Is this even the same girl?" He reaches out a hand and I feel my eyes go wide, remembering the bold, knuckle hair sprouting from his fingers like fur. I turn my head to the side. He takes my chin. My mouth moves.

"Are you trying to say something?"

I cut him with a side eye. "No." He pushes hair from my forehead, thrusting my bare face in front of his stare.

"Hey . . ." It's Captain Levi speaking. "Where do you think you're looking?"

"I can't be sure it's her. She seems half the size."

"Do you require documentation?"

"That's not necessary, Commander." The MP leans down and tugs my chin. On the surface of his eye, I see my face swimming, caught in its dull, unthoughtful glass, shown on display there.

I tighten my fist. I don't like to be looked at. But just as my muscles seize up and begin to communicate violent motion through my arm, my bicep becomes restrained. I know it's the captain who has intercepted me, once again. I jerk my head around, glaring. He's not looking at me. I turn again to see the MP's boots skidding through crunched grit, as though the ground has been pulled out from under him, his arms wheeling in big, roundhouse swings to fight the impending backward fall. The captain's palm remains outstretched, poised flat with how he has shoved the MP in the chest. I watch his hand relax down at his side. Captain Levi's other hand remains a firm restraint on my bicep. We watch the MP tip further, reluctantly, losing the fight against gravity, and finally capsize on his back.

"What the hell are you doing?" the MP says, hot with fury, his legs akimbo in the air. He glares at Captain Levi through the gap of his upturned legs; it's more comical than threatening.

"You had something stuck in your teeth," Captain Levi says, his voice low and phlegmatic, "and I began to feel sorry that this cadet had to see it so closely."

The MP lunges to his feet. He puts up his fists. I stare at the MP, willing him to bow out because, surely, nobody is impulsive enough to challenge Humanity's Strongest. Captain Levi doesn't move, watching, very calm.

"It's usually the responsibility of the Military Police to handle law infringement," says Commander Erwin. "But you said so yourself: Janice Robin has been disciplined more than sufficiently. I believe there's no need for further involvement from the Military Police." The commander rests his hand on my shoulder, relaxing my posture. I lock my hands primly behind my back.

The MP glares at Captain Levi. Captain Levi watches steadily, keeping his chin low, cutting his eyes up through his hair. "The Military Police would've shown some humanity. She's young. Hardly out of adolescence."

"She's older than she looks," Captain Levi says, "and you lot within the interior are much more soft-hearted."

The MP's lip lifts in a snarl. "Listen to me." He seizes me by the shoulders. "I'm about to strike an offer you won't want to refuse. I've seen you fight. You've got a talent. Come with me, and I'll personally take you under my wing. In the Military Police, you won't be treated like a dog."

All four men turn to me. I have no words, no verbal repertoire. I can't project a single sound. The captain steps away, apportioning space between us. The commander waits, betraying nothing in expression or posture. Shadis watches me without any accompanying thought. I put my eyes on the sky.

"Why would you do that for me?" I say.

"The Survey Corps' discipline methods are too extreme. I can help you."

My eyes, a bit bigger than usual, fasten unseeingly to the MP officer. When I speak again, I try to emulate the captain's steady, calm tone. "It's funny, how generous you seem suddenly. But you're rather greedy with your eyes."

"What are you talking about?"

"The men here in the Survey Corps aren't like you. It seems all that any of them can talk about is titans. They're very strange men with even stranger pastimes. But normal people with normal pastimes wouldn't race into hell, would they?" He stares at me. "So let me ask you this: Are you sure you want a girl as strange as me under your charge?"

The MP leaves—and I'm left to the devices of the Survey Corps.

 **XVI.**

I've been told I've done well and deserve a good meal. So once I'm clean and in uniform, I go to the cafeteria, hungry to the point of being sick with it. Little knives of emptiness stab at my ribs, as though to gut me open and grasp the nearest thing in proximity to fill me with. I pull open the cafeteria door—and the knives of emptiness rip at me. I gasp, smelling hot fresh food. There's the captain, to my right, seated at the head of a long table, with a spread of meat and bread and vegetables, and _meat_. I sit down at the other end, where there's an empty plate and clean silverware, facing him.

Captain Levi watches me, skewed in his chair, as though drawing his full mass onto the seat would put him out too much. His elbow is hitched up on the backrest, his legs swung off to the side. "Eat what you want."

I pave my plate with beef—and begin eating rapidly.

"So . . . you eat like a dog too, huh?"

I drag a napkin over my mouth, swallowing. "Not usually." I crumple the napkin in my hand and begin eating again, this time tempering the enthusiasm of my jaws. I drink from my water cup, then cut into the meat. Red juice bleeds up around the knife. I roll out my tongue and let a diced bit of beef fan across my taste buds. I chew, contemplate, and taste it luxuriously.

There's the sound of a clashing wood frame. I turn and see the kitchen doors part for Petra Ral. I drop my eyes to my plate and continue eating. In her hand, she carries a teapot. She goes to the captain and pours steaming tea into the cup arranged in front of him. Levi watches her hands. When her hands pull away with the pot, he watches the steaming cup.

"Thank you," he says.

"You're welcome, Captain. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"No, that's all."

I don't look at Petra, eating. I hear the doors open and close and chance a gander at the Captain.

"I like her," I tell him. "She's nice, but firm."

He puts his knuckles on his cheek, says nothing.

I continue, "Cute too."

He drinks from his cup, still watching me. He puts the cup down. "Don't go getting any ideas. She's too good for you."

I pause, considering where I want to guide the conversation: Am I brave enough to plant a seed in the captain's mind? I decide that I'm not. "That's too bad." I eat some more.

"Why'd you join the Survey Corps?"

"To kill titans, why else?"

"You tell me."

I push my plate away and put my chin in my hands. "I'm angry. Revenge story. The cliché." I add, a moment later, "In short, I'm trying to fill the unfillable sieve."

He looks away from me. "You're quite the egomaniac, raving on about yourself like that."

"Tell me your story, and I'll tell you mine."

"Tch. I'll pass." He stands, pushing back his chair. "Finish eating and rest. Tomorrow you resume your regular schedule."

"Yes, sir."

When I go to sleep, it's still light outside and my stomach is full, and I dream that I fall into a clear blue sky and it wrinkles around me like soft fabric, then gently bounces me back, and when I come up again, the dog is there waiting for me, its tail wagging, its mouth full of strong white teeth.

 **XVII.**

I've cut my hair, and now I'm a new person. A lighter person. I stand at the top of the wall, overlooking a quieting district. The falling sun sets the town to a red glare. I sit down, one knee drawn to my chest, the other hanging freely over the side, and I watch the time drop steadily toward the horizon. A breeze winnows through my short hair. I feel it cool on my scalp.

Past the wall, the sun is setting someplace—and I don't know where that place is. I don't know where the sun goes. If I took off on horseback, past the wall, would I find it? If this is hell, then paradise must be at that place where the sun sets. A place, at the other end of the world, where nothing hurts.

 **XVIII.**

Somehow, Ymir got a hold of some booze and has kindly offered to share. I suspect she stole it from our commanding officers. We bunker down in the boys' barracks. It smells like stale clothes and briny sweat, and the beds are rumpled, as though the boys had collectively rolled out of bed, seconds before us girls invaded. We pass two dice around; if you throw an identical pair, you must chug your drink. Mikasa, an apparent lightweight, has passed out on Eren's leg. Hannah and Thomas are necking on one of the bunks; they do that sober, but not quite as exhibitionistic as they are now. Some of the guys groan and shout at them to get out. Connie hurls a pillow at them. It hits Thomas's head with a cushioned inefficiency and falls to the floor.

As the dice circulate, I (a bit intoxicated myself) entertain Christa with a coin trick, making a silver dollar appear and disappear in front of her nose. We're sitting cross-legged, parallel to one another. My face is melted with alcohol, and it's much easier to smile with a melted face. I flutter the coin between my fingers, toss it into the air, catch it in my right hand and open my left. The coin is tucked there inside my palm. I open my right one too, showing her that it's empty.

Christa gasps hugely, her mouth expanding into a gaping Oh. "How'd you do that, was it magic?"

"Don't be stupid, Christa," says Ymir. "It's an illusion." She's slanted against a bedpost of one of the bunks, her arms crossed. Her short, dark hair is unpinned.

"An illusion?" Christa stares at my hands in amazement.

"Hey, Jan . . ." Ymir says slowly. I look up at her, chilled by the way she's used an intimate nickname. She's smiling at me without any hint of warmth, her eyes holding only spite. "Why don't you teach me that trick of yours?"

I blink slowly at her and say nothing. The two drinking dice fall in front of me. I pick them up and throw two fives. I upend my bottle. I hand the dice to Christa. She throws a three and a five and passes the dice to Ymir. While Ymir is preoccupied, I get up and go out the door, unnoticed, rolling the silver dollar between my fingers.

My feet take me away from the barracks and I let them go without thought to pilot them. The night is silver with moonlight and the trees groan without leaves. My feet go on, tracking into nowhere while I think about everything, all at once. Filled with everything as I am, I want to speak to someone. I want to ask questions. I want to hear someone else's thoughts. I don't want to be alone with myself anymore. It turns out I'm not very good company. My feet go on, and my thoughts turn relentlessly. Before I know it, I've gone into the main building, down the hall, and followed the warm, orange light of a crackling fireplace.

It leads me to the lounge where the hearth is going steadily. The fireplace reduces the distance between the room's walls so I feel protected and close. The light is thrown directly onto a pockmarked armchair set at the room's epicenter. The chair is not vacant. I see an arm first, propped on the furling armrest, then a fist braced against cheekbone. From an oncoming slant, I see flicks of black hair and the edge of a brooding jawline in hindsight of the fire's glow. I go in, letting my footfalls announce me. The captain sits motionless until my feet bring me into his peripheral. His eyes move from the fire. He lifts his head from his fist, turning his head now, to see me comprehensively. I am not the person he expected. I square my shoulders and salute him, bending my head a little in further respect.

"Captain Levi."

"Janice Robin," he says a bit languidly. There's a small coffee stand next to the armchair, hosting a decanter and a crystal glass of whiskey. I ease my salute. His eyes feel around my expression, and then a stitch of humor gathers between his brows without touching his mouth. "You're in a good mood, I see."

"I am," I say.

"Are you aware it's past curfew?"

"I am," I say again.

"Were you the little shit who stole our booze?"

"No. But I did ingest it."

"You like to test me, don't you?"

"No. I'm a timid person, I've told you that." The drink has loosened my tongue and so I continue. "And only an idiot would do something that stupid. You scare me, you know."

He reaches across his shoulder and takes up the crystal whiskey glass in his hand, withdrawing. He puts the rim to his lips and stares into the fire. His eyes are dark. He tosses back two-fingers and holds it in his mouth. He sets the glass aside. It clinks against the table. His throat moves in a long swallow.

"It's not that I'm afraid, exactly." I fold my legs and sit within the tightest, strongest light of the fire. I open my hand and catch the heat on my palm. "I think very highly of you—and I don't want that to change."

"You hide behind your illusions."

"Doesn't everyone?"

"Children do. You may have a young face, but you don't seem like a child to me."

"No?" I turn over my shoulder, seeing the captain bathed in light. "Have you ever been a child?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"You know what I mean."

The captain's dark eyes bear down on me, but I feel too good to be self-conscious. His hand slowly glides out to the stand. "No, I don't suppose I know what it's like to be a child."

"I'm sorry. It must've been hard, to never have been young."

Taking the glass, he contemplates the gold whiskey, staring into it with a kind of unwilling nostalgia. "I think I was a child for a moment. When my mother was around."

"Did she hold you?"

His expression is dimensionless. He doesn't look at me. "Yes." The light shifts on his throat as he throws back the drink. He takes the decanter bottle. I listen to the sound of liquid and glass and underneath that, the comfortable sound of fire consuming wood. "It's an illusion I remember well," he says, refilling his drink. "It seems more concrete than . . . " His eyes are orange with firelight. I look at him hard, as though trying to see past the rippled surface of water to the very bottom of a deep, dark well.

"I'll tell you why I joined the Survey Corps," I say.

"Do you need this?" He generously proffers his full whiskey glass. Standing, I take it and luxuriate the pleasant flame in my chest. I drag my hand across my lips.

"And I'm going to tell you this, only because I'm drunk. If I were sober, none of this would be happening." I return the glass and grab the sides of the armchair, steadying the alcoholic vertigo swimming through me. He finishes what's left of the whiskey. The bottom of the glass rings melodically against the coffee stand.

"Will you regret it in the morning?" he says.

"Of course." I look down at him sunk in the chair. He's loosened and warm, his face tilted up at me. I stare a moment. He appears softened. "Do you mind following me outside?"

In the forest, tree branches and bushes and patches of grass have been bent beneath Franz and Hannah's amorous escapade from the other night. I can track their passage where their scurrying departure lingers in intermittent signs. My eyes follow the signs, and I imagine their shapes stumbling into each other, their legs and arms colliding in a passionate urgency, Franz tugging playfully on Hannah's hand, and their quiet laughter spiriting through the trees, as they sprawl quickly away from HQ to be alone together. Now I'm leading the captain down the same trail, bending branches away and picking our way across the pine-needle slide of the forest floor. It might be the alcohol, but I feel like a teenager again. I look back at the captain. He's pushing past a branch, ducking his head. Booze has impaired the ease of his stride, and his cheekbones appear hot to the touch.

The forest gives out onto a pond where the moon bleeds its white, heatless light into the water. As I walk closer to the shoreline, my footfalls change from a grassy mutter to a sandy whisper. The sky is open and clear. At the edge of the water, I look out at the liquid moonlight. The captain's whispering footfalls close distance until he comes up beside me. We both fluctuate inside our bodies, trying to keep balance. I hold onto his shoulder. He clasps my wrist back, hard, in his fist. My fingers curl at the pressure, and I feel my pulse squeezing through constricted veins.

"Why have you brought me here?" he says. His grip is firm and imperative on my wrist. I hold onto his shoulder, despite the unreliability of that pillar, trusting the iron of his backbone, even though he too has been melted.

"You were right," I tell him. "I was coming unhinged."

"About your hand . . ."

"Yes?"

"You're unwell."

"I think all of us are unwell. If we weren't unwell, why would we choose to fight titans?"

"What are you exactly, Janice?"

"I don't know, exactly." I begin to laugh. "I'm sorry, Captain. I'm very drunk. I'm not making any sense."

"You do that sober."

"Yes, I know. But I can tell you that when the decisive moment arrives, I'll take the role of a soldier. And I'm quite good at it." I reach down and pick up a stone. "It's these walls that make me insane. I can't stand them. When we're here for too long . . ." I throw the stone across the water. We both watch it skip across the surface until it slips out of sight.

"Why did you join the Survey Corps?" he says. "Answer that, and I'll decide if I can rely on you."

"It's as you said: I'm an egomaniac. I can't endure knowing that one day I'll disappear and time will move on. I can't imagine becoming nothing. I can't imagine missing out on what will happen tomorrow. Everything that I've experienced will just—blink out."

It's the longest speech I've given in years—and I'm not through. A skein of words spins out of my mouth as though Captain Levi has gotten hold of the thread of my thoughts and is pulling it from my throat.

"And it scares me that I'll always be inside myself, that you'll always be you and I'll always be me, and we'll never be able to fully understand one another." I smile to offset the panic quickening my heart rate. "I mean, I'm bound to this past, to this mind, to this body, and I can't leave it and nobody can see inside my head, and so I can't know what you're thinking and you can't know what I'm thinking, and everyone is inside their own hermetic seal that can't be violated. And it's all very lonely. Why are we like this? Why is being human so lonely?" By the time I finish, my smile feels wan and unnatural.

The captain is looking at the water. I know that I've said nonsense, and he's taking the time to diagnose my unwellness.

"I'll be honest," he says carefully. "You're not wrong. But the way I see it, you've fanned the flame to your own fear." He looks at me. "The only way I can know what you're thinking is if you tell me what you're thinking. It doesn't have to be as lonely as you say."

"But I can't—" I gesture with my hands, spinning them away from my mouth, as though miming vomit. "I don't know _how_ to do that."

He touches my wrist and I understand the meaning behind the gesture: There are other ways to communicate. I move my hand away. He reaches down for a stone and flicks it into the air. He catches it in his fist.

"Seems to me you've isolated yourself for so long that you've distorted your solitude into a much bigger problem. Does that sound accurate?"

"Yes, that sounds accurate."

"And do you know the reason for it?"

"No, I don't."

"I'll tell you the reason." He snaps the stone across the water. It goes much farther than mine. Almost embarrassingly so. His mouth has softened a little, and he puts his hand in his pocket. "It's because you're a goddamn romantic. And in this world, that happens to be the most dangerous philosophy a person can subscribe to."

I say, "How reckless of me."

 **XIX.**

Back in the lounge, the captain has occupied the armchair, with loose arms and loose legs, and I sit on the floor, beside the chair. I lean my chin on my knee. I feel warm with booze—and invincibly content.

"One way or another, I'm going to die," I say. "And I could either die inside these walls. Or I could die outside, fighting for something with meaning. The choice to join the Survey Corps seemed a clear path for me."

"Yeah," Captain Levi says. "It seems a clear path to an abridged life."

"Another perk."

"Tch." He leans his face on his knuckles, looking at the fire. "Tell me, Janice, were you ever a child?"

"Yes, before the fall."

"I see."

I look up into his face. The fire pulls shadows beneath his eyes.

"Is that not the right answer?" I say.

His eyes slide down to me. He doesn't reply.

"What did you want me to say?"

"Who knows," he says.

"Captain Levi . . ."

"I thought we might be the same."

I relax my temple against the chair. "I'm sorry we're not the same." I reach up, opening my hand to him. "But even though we're different, you don't have to feel alone." He puts his fingers against mine. And I suppose this is a kind of communication, too, my fingers communicating to his a sense of closeness, despite that we're two separate people with two separate lives, two separate pasts and two separate futures.


End file.
